Yahoo Mail Is One Third Of Yahoo's Traffic

How important is Yahoo's email service? Extremely. It's the biggest property Yahoo (YHOO) has, as illustrated by this Hitwise graph. Yahoo Mail receives 36.7% of the visits to 80 top Yahoo properties. The homepage is 25.5% and Yahoo Search is 11.8%.

The good news: Yahoo's share is steady, even growing a bit. Among Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, Yahoo had 56% share in February, up 3% year-over-year. Microsoft (MSFT) Live/Hotmail dropped 25% to 19%; Google's (GOOG) Gmail grew 88% to 11%. Note that this doesn't include AOL (TWX).